Tom Peters, famous Management Thinker, claims that: ?Design is one of the keys to business success. The trouble is that most CEO?s and Managers don?t really understand what that statement means?. In the very first Brand_Talk article (refer to www.lexpress.mu and search for Brand_Talk dated 10 March) we have started by showing how brands are close to our daily existence. Well brands, first of all have some important functions to play by satisfying various needs of customers and ?manufacturing? dreams for them, but brands are all dressed up in various forms, shapes, volumes, materials, packaging and colours. This is where design and creativity intervene as strategic tools, integrating analysis, market research, psychology and marketing. Today we talk about Design Management as a comprehensive discipline, a key resource and valuable corporate asset that needs to be effectively managed to make visible contributions to bottom line and long-term success. While a good mix of intuition and analysis is necessary in shaping design decisions and processes, Design and Creative Focus in a very broad sense participate integrally in the creation and maintenance of brands across the whole planet.

The important thing manufacturers and marketers do to ensure their brands show improved Brand Value is to always integrate the Customer?s expectations as inputs in designing products and services.

Dell has carved a reputation in building and delivering computers based on customer orders: literally ?designing? products that perfectly match customer needs. Organizations must increasingly live for their customer-base and regularly make this diverse group part of their design and development process to succeed today. The benefits are inestimable. Benetton can for instance change what it has on its shelves a dozen of times faster than Sears. Design Management as a corporate Value plays a key role in making sure that customer needs are effectively fed into the research and production process to bring bottom line results.

By ?Thinking Differently? since its inception, Apple has effectively used the design function to create a new ?computing? experience characterized by user-friendliness and interactivity so successfully that today all PCs have copied the MAC interface! (Bill Gates has intelligently exploited this creative resource on a commercial basis and is still the richest man on earth!) Same thing for Sony. So ?chapeau? to Steeve Jobs and Akio Morita in positioning Design Management, the art and skill of managing the value and contribution of design in an organization, at the heart of Value Creation.

What about our local design community? Art Directors, Copywriters, Thinkers, Illustrators, Graphic Designers, Web Programmers, Photographers all share a great challenge in creating a local Design Management culture. Last year the DCDM Business School has trained 25 students in Graphic Design, out of which 7 specialized in MultiMedia. The IVTB design centre which started by offering NTC2 courses in 1995 has today a capacity of producing 12 Fashion Designers, 22 Graphic Designers and 1 Multi-Media Designer. Add those who come from overseas countries and you have a potentially rich local design community that can positively influence things around. Just drop me a line or two if you feel like sharing how we can help in building an indigenous and cosmopolitan design community in Mauritius focused towards the future. In the meantime, let?s design the present?

Do not forget to tune-in on Radio One on Fridays as from 18:20.

<B>Ashraf Oozeerally ([email protected])</B>